It was said about the square that the sand was so flea-infested that if
one picked up a handful of it, by the time the fleas had all hopped
away, there was no sand left. The stock law probably killed the flea
story, but under the paving the sand is still deep, believe it or not.
And the editor of The Gilmer Mirror says that fleas still live in that
sand, believe it or not. At least, he says they were very much alive
when The Mirror installed a new press a dozen or more years ago. It was
necessary to excavate about four feet to build a foundation and have a
roomy pit under the press. In doing so, the fleas came out of their
hibernation and for weeks kept everyone in the office scratching. Worse
than that, the man sent here by the factory to install the press was
apparently allergic to fleas. At any rate he was so flea-bitten and
covered with whelps that he had to be examined by the county health
officer to prove that he did not have the smallpox, as some accused him.
In the early fall of 1903, someone got the idea of aiding the farmers
who might haul two bales of cotton to town, but could not make it
through the sand and across the square. Often it would take two teams to
pull one bale of cotton through the hub-deep sand. At that time there
was a sawmill and planer in the northern part of town, and shavings were
hauled and spread over the sand. Citizens marveled when they saw two
horses trotting, get—trotting—across the square, pulling a bale of
cotton. But the sand swallowed the shavings so quickly that this
“paving” did not prove practical.
About 1907 the night train arrived about four o’clock in the morning. A
passenger alighted, but decided it was too late to go to bed, instead he
wandered to the deserted sand square. That morning another paving idea
was born. This “unknown man” thought that a good solution would be to
scrape down the clay hills joining the square and spread this clay over
the sand to form a hard surface. As the merchants arrived on the square
that morning, this dreamer presented his plan. He sold the idea so well,
that by mid-morning, teams and scrapers were assembled and moving clay
in. The south, west, and part of the north side were covered. This
experiment was more successful, and made it easy to think through to
crushed iron ore rock, the immediate predecessor of the present brick
paving, which was laid in 1926 when Dick Denman was mayor. The deep sand
of Gilmer is now only a memory.